I am dealing with a paper about standards and Free Software and I’ve found out that the term ‘open standard’ is a very common term in literature (and commercial advertising). According to most of the definitions I found, an ‘open standard’ can be patented and, at best, subject to RAND licensing policies. This translate into ‘open standard _can_ be impossible to implement in Free Software’.

Now, since I am summarizing in this paper what defines a standard that is implementable in Free Software, it would be nice to propose also a term that is non controversial like ‘open standard’.

Free standard is not good: I don’t think it’s savvy to replicate the fight between ‘open’ and ‘free’. A friend whispered ‘non discriminatory standard’ but he agrees that the negation at the beginning is less than optimal. I couldn’t think of any more solutions, so I ask here two questions:

1) does it make sense to introduce in the Free Software community a new term that is non-controversial and more precise than the generic ‘open standard’?

2) if yes, what would that term be?

Any suggestion appreciated. Please comment here or on the list Discussion where I posted this same message and I will summarize any useful result.

Software Freedom Law Center
On the factual basis described, and subject to reservations, it is our opinion that ODF, as standardized and licensed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information (OASIS), is free of legal encumbrances that would prevent its use in free and open source software, as distributed under licenses authored by Apache and the FSF.

There are many descriptions online of how DRM (digital restrictions
management) work, but few images actually try to picture a real life
scenario. These images have been modeled after a simple scenario
described in the Digital Media Project, the people that is trying to
develop an interoperable DRM. I have used the use case n. 8 (Personal Photo) from the Approved Document No. 4 —
Technical Specification: Use Cases and Value Chains to help Fellows explain why Free Software is incompatible with DRM, no matter what others say.

Get the file from here and let me know what you think, if it is correct and how to improve it.

After Zidane trying to stop Materazzi’s heart, Liberation tries to suggest some ‘bad words’ in Italian in this mp3 file… How disappointing, it is repetitive and boring. I can do better as Georg and kyrah know 😉